Millions of small-business owners had been staring down a deadline to report ownership information to the Treasury Department as part of the Corporate Transparency Act, but that requirement is now up in the air after a court’s intervention.
Judge Amos Mazzant III of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas on Tuesday issued a nationwide injunction halting the implementation of the new requirements under the Corporate Transparency Act. The requirements called for businesses with fewer than 20 employees to provide names, dates of birth, addresses and other identifying information about its owners.
The move was part of a larger effort by the Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to crack down on money laundering and other financial crimes. Existing businesses had until Jan. 1 to report such information.
But unlike Biden-era workplace regulations that had recently lost in court that were an exercise of agency rule-making authority, the new requirements were part of a law passed by Congress on a bipartisan basis in 2021, although it had become a focal point of opposition among some small-business groups since.
